These days, I’ve been thinking about this newsletter and its future. I shared some preliminary thoughts with our Slack members and Patreon supporters and will share more information with all the subscribers throughout May. Rodrigo is on a well-deserved holiday, so for the next couple of weeks, you are stuck with me covering the publications of the week. Let’s kick off this issue with some breaking news!
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Boston Dynamics on LinkedIn: Farewell to HD Atlas
Breaking news: Boston Dynamics just posted an update about retiring the /hydraulic/ Atlas robot. Does it mean a model with electric-only actuators is coming? I would bet on this since so much R&D went into this project, and BD created amazing demonstrators with these robots. As always, the featured video contains some fails, some of which I’ve never seen before. Farewell buddy.
R&D Case Study: Developing the OptiGap Sensor System
I loved this story by Paul Bupe, Jr, where he describes his process of developing a novel sensor that combines optical fiber and airgaps to detect light transmission changes caused by bending. Paul says this idea resembles the functionality of an encoder, and it could be handy for soft robotics.
Learning agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning
I remember including these little RL-trained bipedal robots before. I don’t remember if it was the preprint for this research or if it’s the next iteration but I love these robots I can never get enough of the videos showing them in action. Just adorable.
Ukraine Is the First “Hackers’ War”
I find it unfortunate that hobby-grade drones are used this way in conflict, but at the same time, I’m not surprised. The article provides a profound overview of the technology used by Russia and Ukraine on the front lines.
A monocycle robot with two legs
“Wheels and legs each have their advantages, so why not combine both? ECE associate professor Joohyung Kim has created “Ringbot,” a monocycle robot with two legs. The hybrid leg-wheel mechanism enables the robot to tackle diverse terrains, from urban areas to indoor environments. The robot’s ability to maneuver through narrow spaces means this design can be adapted for last-mile deliveries in congested environments”.
Body Design and Gait Generation of Chair-Type Asymmetrical Tripedal Low-rigidity Robot
Researchers from the JSK Robotics Laboratory at the University of Tokyo created a walking three-legged chair. Each leg has two degrees of freedom, resulting in an interesting platform for using Reinforcement Learning for various gaits.
Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?
Here is a lovely write-up by Melissa Heikkilä on the current state of robotics x AI. In the article, you will find some of the latest research (some of it featured in the newsletter), mainly looking at applying robots at home.
Publication of the Week - BTGenBot: Behavior Tree Generation for Robotic Tasks with Lightweight LLMs
This paper explores generating behavior trees using LLMs. It turns out that not every model is up to the task (pun intended), especially with zero-shot prompts. The researchers showed the best results of their setup when they used a one-shot prompt with an additional step of applying static analysis to correct the output. For more information about this project, check out this repository where you will find source code and instructions on running this project.
Business
Collaborative Robotics raises $100M in Series B for mysterious mobile manipulator
“Collaborative Robotics today closed a $100 million Series B round on the road to commercializing its autonomous mobile manipulator. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it is developing robots that can safely and affordably work alongside people in varied manufacturing, supply chain, and healthcare workflows. In many cases, this is the same work that humanoid robots are jockeying for”.
Amazon invests over $743M in robotics across its European operations
“Amazon last week provided insights into its plans to further invest in its European operations. The company is using its Vercinelli, Italy-based European Operations Innovation Lab to develop and test technologies that would better support employees and deliver for customers”.
Events
- RoboSoft 2024: Apr 14 - Apr 17, 2024. San Diego, United States of America
- Xponential: Apr 22 - Apr 25, 2024. San Diego, United States of America
- Robotics Summit & Expo: May 01 - May 02, 2024. Boston, United States of America
- Open Hardware Summit 2024: May 03 - May 04, 2024. Montreal, Canada
- Automate: May 06 - May 09, 2024. Chicago, United States of America
- Eurobot Open 2024: May 08 - May 11, 2024. La Roche-sur-Yon, France
- ICCRE 2024: May 10 - May 12, 2024. Osaka, Japan
- ICRA 2024: May 13 - May 17, 2024. Yokohama, Japan
- ISMR (Medical Robotics) 2024: Jun 03 - Jun 05, 2024. Atlanta, Georgia, United States
- ICUAS (UAVs) 2024: Jun 04 - Jun 07, 2024. Chania, Crete, Greece
For more robotic events, check out our event page.